Welcome to the Potato State--Now Go Home : Idaho: Californians fleeing big-city problems have been met with resentment by their new neighbors.

JOHN M. GLIONNATIMES STAFF WRITER

Each year, the winds of August bring a smoky controversy to this bustling Northwest city, pitting a stubborn stock of locals against a quirky new breed of resident: The ex-Californian.

That's when farmers set fire to 40,000 acres of bluegrass in a time-tested technique to add nitrogen to the soil and increase crop yields. Throughout August--prime tourist season in rural northern Idaho--the skies above Kootenai County blacken with billowing plumes of soot, a surefire signal of the Potato State's biggest rhubarb.

Like thousands of other environmentally conscious California transplants, John Mann watches the streaks of smoke trail low over Coeur d'Alene Lake and its international-resort hotel, over blue-collar housing tracts sprouting from once-virgin forest land and massive, newly built mansions that locals refer to as "California dance halls."

And he fumes.

"You show me somebody who doesn't complain about the smoke and I'll show you an idiot," says the former Thousand Oaks resident, frowning in distaste. "But these farmers are given free rein--just because this is the way they've always done things.

"I just don't get it. This would never happen in California."

The bluegrass burn-off is just one volley in a cultural clash being waged in this tradition-bound town of 28,000 residents less than 100 miles south of the Canadian border. Californians, weary of the crime, earthquakes and overcrowding back home, have come here by the carload, bringing with them fat home equities and what the locals regard as curious big-city attitudes.

Californians are moving northward in search of a rural solace many believe can no longer be found in the country's most populous state. Between 1991 and 1993, a reported 28,202 Californians moved to Idaho, making up nearly 27% of the state's 98,446 new residents. In the same period, 5,315 of those California transplants moved to Kootenai County, nearly 40% of its newcomers.

California provides more than twice as many emigres to Idaho as second-place Washington state. And even many of the latter, according to Idaho state transportation officials who tally newcomer origins through auto license plate transfers, are once-removed Californians who moved on after finding the growing congestion of Seattle and Puget Sound too much like home.

Those numbers are fueled in part by a growing number of San Fernando Valley residents weary of the noise and drive-by shootings as well as what they call the outrageous price of doing business in places like Van Nuys, Chatsworth and North Hollywood.

John Mann left Thousand Oaks and a career as a stockbroker because he hate L.A. traffic and cultural tensions. "I'm no racist, but I just got tired of being a minority in Los Angeles, tired of explaining English to 7-Eleven clerks and counting their change for them," he said.

"And I'd go orbital, absolutely berserk, if I had to sit in traffic. I'd hyperventilate, pound on the wheel. Once I chased a guy, doing 105 m.p.h. on the Simi Valley Freeway, because I was sick of him cruising my neighborhood at 11 p.m. with his boom box blaring."

Inspired by such suburban pioneers, the centuries-long westward migration to the Pacific has taken a decided turn to the north as tens of thousands of Californians follow The Dream to states such as Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Colorado.

For most Southern Californians, this new life has been a bit of northern exposure--searching for their own private Idaho, a niche among the strait-laced and sometimes cranky native population who wear the term local like some Great Northwest badge of honor.

Barbara Lund, a 40ish ex-model from the City of Industry, had such a hard time adjusting to Idaho men that she founded a dating club for California transplants, attracting dozens of lonely hearts, frozen out of or self-exiled from the Idaho singles scene.

"Idaho," Lund sums it up, "can be a very lonely place."

The name Coeur d'Alene was coined centuries ago by Native American hunters, angered by French traders they thought were low-balling fur prices. They called them small-hearted men. Hence, the story goes, Coeur d'Alene means, roughly, "heart the size of an alene, " a small leather-piercing tool the Native Americans used.

Today in Coeur d'Alene, many locals are lashing back at what they regard as a new small-hearted invasion, of big-city "kooks" whose very appearance and every action affronts their traditional values.

"There's a stereotype of Californians here," said David Bond, a reporter for the Coeur d'Alene Press. "They roller-blade around town in neon, glow-in-the-dark clothes. They put fences around their land and call the Forest Service all winter long, complaining that locals are killing the deer."

Californians, locals say, just can't comprehend the folksy style of the Handle, the thin, wooded finger of northern Idaho dividing Montana and Washington state, where deals are sealed with a handshake, where you can ride a horse for two days straight without crossing an asphalt road, where its plumb impossible to find a mechanic or carpenter on the first day of hunting season.

And everybody understands--except the Californians.

Coeur d'Alene native Ted Anderson is fed up with watching his hometown turned into a "little Los Angeles." He tells of Californians suing the city, local residents and one another, including one Los Angeles family who had the gall to fence off access to a popular local watering hole and forbid people to swim there.

"They're a funny bunch," said the 86-year-old retired sign painter. "They hated the place they came from so much, they headed for the hills. Now they want to make the hills just like California."

Locals like Anderson say Coeur d'Alene is changing faster than the weather on a fall Friday.

Suddenly, the summer air is filled with police sirens and the detested blare of car alarms. Locals complain that there are racial problems in their school system (although it is still more than 98% white) and grumble that kids in "gang-style" backward baseball caps and baggy shorts are popping up in the traditional local high school sea of cowboy boots and Wrangler jeans. Teen-agers are bringing guns to class, no longer seeing them as tools--as their fathers and grandfathers did--but as weapons, they say.

In Idaho, moose, deer and osprey still line the roadsides like 7-Elevens "back there" in California. Locals around Hayden Lake pump unfiltered water into their houses. People pay for their gas after they've pumped it--with a personal check, no less. It's a place where Democrat Bill Clinton finished third in the last presidential election, thank you.

So what if the average salary is $19,000 a year, that there are more minimum-wage jobs than pine cones scattered across the forest floor. This is a proud, right-to-work state where leaving car and house doors unlocked doesn't spell disaster, where teen-agers are watched by stern-faced cops issuing tickets for offenses such as underage smoking and spitting on the sidewalk.

The neighborhood banker, waitress and police officer will wave to you in the street, call you by your first name and even ask about the kids.

All this is endangered, the locals will tell you, by the flood of Californians, with their rude driving habits and standoffish demeanor. The resentment surfaces in jokes told at bars, notes left on car windshields or epithets tossed at passing sports cars.

Some of the resentment is based on dollars and cents. Armed with huge equities siphoned from the Los Angeles real-estate boom of recent decades, ex-Californians have invested heavily in Kootenai County property, raising housing prices to where many blue-collar Coeur d'Alene residents now cannot afford to buy a home.

In Kootenai County alone, there are 700 realtors, mostly to serve the California market. Indeed, locals point out, 1% of the population has a real estate license. Just five years ago, $100,000 homes were an extravagance. Now homes regularly sell for half a million dollars. Rents in many cases have doubled since 1990.

"Nobody can afford to buy a house in this town," Bond said. "There was a day when you could live here in poverty with a reasonable amount of dignity. Those days are gone."

It grates on locals that on some stretches of Route 95, the main north-south thoroughfare through town, there are bothersome traffic lights every half-mile now, where Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes sometimes outnumber John Deere tractors.

To make matters worse, folks learned last year that an Irvine real estate broker was actually teaching people how to leave California in a three-hour UC Riverside seminar entitled "How to Move to the Pacific Northwest."

Even more irksome than newcomers, however, are those who presume that five years in Idaho makes them a native--with the right to slam the door on everyone else.

The local no-growth committee, locals point out, is composed primarily of ex-Californians.

One Coeur d'Alene resident advertised a 10-page anti-Californian pamphlet for $4.95, entitled "North Idaho: The Case Against the Californians." The author had moved here from San Diego.

Debi Mann, who came here from Thousand Oaks four years ago, admits she wants to close the door on future transplants. "We thought we found our own Shangri-La and no one else knew about it. Now it's all being ruined. What I say to these newcomers is, 'Go find your own Nirvana. You're tainting my dream.' "

"I resent being called a Californian," said her husband, John. "It's discriminatory. Anyway, so what if I'm a Californian? It's just a way these locals use to single me out as a person who's opposed to the status quo."

Other ex-Californians have found it easier to just stick to themselves. And when one family moved back to San Diego last year, they put the California-bashing to work for them. They threw a "Send Us Back to California" yard sale.

There are some locals who feel Californians are good for Idaho, bringing a newfound cultural diversity--authentic Mexican restaurants, coffee shops, micro-breweries.

And best of all, they say, new ideas.

"This town was still debating women's suffrage in 1978," says reporter Bond, a bearded former Seattle rock critic adorned with a French beret and Looney Toon tie. "For many locals, gourmet food meant deep-fried something. Nobody drank wine without a metal cap. The new blood has changed that."

But progress has come at a price, say Bond and others, who complain that some Californians brought along the racial tensions they complained about in California.

Not long ago, African Americans were a rarity--13 in the county in 1970, growing to 68 in 1980 and 139 in 1990 out of a population of 80,000.

"When I arrived from Santa Barbara in 1978, people stared," said 43-year-old mechanic Phil Wilson. "They would stop me to ask if I were black. Some had never seen a black person before. They didn't want me to work on their cars."

Now Coeur d'Alene has a white-supremacy group--its leader and many members are ex-Californians--as well as hundreds of Southern California law-enforcement retirees, each seeking a perceived sense of racial purity, Bond and others say.

Jim Wilson, a former Oceanside policeman who now runs a Coeur d'Alene radiator shop, founded a social group for California law-enforcement transplants who moved north for the wide open spaces--as well as racial motives--he says.

"How do I say this tactfully?" he said. "In Southern California, 80% of the calls you get as a policeman are from Hispanics and blacks. You just get tired of it. You want to get away."

Bond regards these as Californians Idaho can do without. "Believe it or not, California has provided us with some real narrow thinkers," he said. "We may be rednecks up here, but we're not bigots. There's a difference."

Lund, the former model, describes the joy of life in the Northwest--crisp mornings, watching the tips of trees stab the descending sun at dusk. Then there's the frustration of trying to find good company here, she says--trouble that started as soon as she arrived in 1988.

"I was lonely," she said. "Men were afraid of me because I was a city girl. They didn't have a clue. One wanted to race me to the top of a hill to see if I could keep up, gauge what kind of woman I was. I thought he wanted to inspect my teeth, too."

In 1993, she placed a newspaper ad: "Single ex-Californians group forming. Will meet Tuesday night. Call Barbara for details."

A dozen transplants showed up, each with horror tales of encounters with locals, who fought back with anonymous prank calls, she says. At the group's meetings in a local saloon, locals would rubberneck from the bar, laughing, pointing at the silly Californians.

"There was this air of hostility," Lund said, "like someone was going to lob a Molotov cocktail into our group."

While the club has led her to some nice California men, she dreads the coming of winter. "It gets dark at 4 p.m., with snow piled past the window tops. It just makes you want to cozy up to the fire with somebody special. That is, if you can find them."

Bob Potter, a former AT & T executive and ex-resident of La Canada Flintridge, is now president of Jobs Plus, a nonprofit agency whose goal is to bring good-paying manufacturing jobs to an Idaho economy depressed by slowdowns in the mining and logging industries. At age 66, he's been called the grand poobah of Coeur d'Alene, a soft-spoken Idaho ambassador who schmoozes prospective transplants with country-club golf rounds and cocktails by the lake.

But he tries not to portray a move to Idaho as the stairway to heaven.

"It's a financial and cultural gamble," he says. "People shouldn't come here expecting to make a killing with some downtown frozen yogurt shop. Because they won't."

In five years, Potter has recruited 37 companies to Kootenai County, 33 of those from Southern California--including several small firms from the San Fernando Valley, such as U. S. Products from Agoura and the Wilkinson Co. of Westlake Village. In all, he has created 2,000 new jobs for local residents as well as relocating a handful of workers from places like Anaheim, Reseda and Woodland Hills.

Among his converts are Ron Prior and Susan Harris, who relocated their North Hollywood wheelchair manufacturing firm to Coeur d'Alene. They prefer the Northwest's cooler climate. It's the residents who are too chilly for them.

Like the cop who they say pulled them over because of their California license plates. Or the teen-ager who heckled Susan in a supermarket. "I told him to back off," she recalled, "that we had brought a factory and jobs to this place. He just shriveled up."

Susan Harris, a part-time belly-dance instructor, said life in Idaho has shown her Los Angeles has not cornered the market on weirdness. Soon after moving in, Harris found bras and panties missing from suitcases stored at the new factory. Police arrested an employee who was charged in similar thefts at 100 local homes.

"Lucky us. We hired the only panty thief in Coeur d'Alene."

After less than two years, Kathy Smith and her husband are taking their three sons back to Orange County, fed up with Idaho's rugged weather and surly attitudes. "Once the beauty wears off," she said, "there's not much to like about this place.

"People tell you to relax, 'This is northern Idaho,' they say. If you dress professionally, they say, 'Heck, where are you going, to a wedding? Or is it a funeral?' Get me out of this place."

Here's the other side to that California coin:

While they miss Dodger games and the cosmopolitan food and wine choices found in stores like Trader Joe's, Nick and Linda Teets traded the Southern California lifestyle for one decidedly more laid-back.

The former Westlake couple believe that Californians would have an easier time in Idaho if they would just shut their mouths and stop bragging about the good life they left back home. When in Idaho, they advise, do as the Idahoans do.

For the Teets, that means building a home on the wooded slopes of Hayden Lake, and it won't include a Jacuzzi like they had in California.